Rebecca Lyles's Blog, page 6

Taking out the fluff

Fluff has its place. Kittens, down comforters, meringue desserts. But it’s a readability-killer when it creeps into your writing. I don’t know whether Writing Fluff is taught in business schools or whether it’s something Marketing majors learn on the street. Either way, there’s too much of it out there.

So what—you ask—is fluff in writing? Anything that adds unnecessary volume without adding meaning. Adjectives, adverbs, gerunds, prepositional phrases, run-on sentences. In a misguided attempt to say everything, fluff writers succeed only in obscuring the message they’re trying to convey.

Much marketing copy reads as if four people sat around a table and collaborated on a pitch. The goal was to say everything they could think of about the product in one sentence. One by one, each person contributed a word or a thought until the sentence reached the optimum level of fluffiness. Here is an actual example from ABC company (not its real name), where I once worked:

Only ABC provides an approach that uniquely brings information, processes and people together in a dynamic case-based application that leverages ABC’s unique strength in analytics to help optimize case outcomes, while leveraging the broadest ecosystem of available business-ready solutions and richest portfolio of enterprise software capabilities.

I can just hear them asking, “Did we say unique enough?” and “How about optimize, leverage, and ecosystem?” “Wait! We forgot dynamic and solutions!” Meanwhile, if you made it to the end of this convoluted sentence, chances are you lost track of what they’re selling. (Hint: It’s case management software.)

It can be fun to create a fluff-filled sentence as an exercise, as long as you don’t try to use it on the public. Here’s a fictitious horrible example. Can you guess what business it is?

Only XYZ provides a dazzling array of wonderfully diverse herbaceous comestibles including salubrious tubers, rhizomes, and legumes, but not to the exclusion of salutary tree-bearing seed-associated structures in a variety of species utilizing all the processes of modern agribusiness to the exclusion of irresponsible application of biocides, nematicides, and other pathogens which may or may not affect the overall level of functional or metabolic efficiency of living organisms.

Answer: Organic fruit and vegetable stand.

Makes your mouth water, doesn’t it?

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Lost in translation

Many Americans speak only English. As business becomes increasingly diverse and global, that embarrassing fact grows more obvious. While making fun of immigrants’ accents (incidentally, how good is your Mandarin – or Arabic – or Hindi?), some people arrogantly assume that translation is easy. We don’t do it, of course, because we have online tools and they do it for us.

Or do they?

Just type a phrase into the box, select the language, and … Voila! You can instantly communicate with anyone in his native tongue. But how do you know he’s not politely suppressing a guffaw at what you said? You don’t.

The epitome of dictionary-aided literal translation was captured, like a bug in amber, more than a hundred years ago by Peter Carolino in English As She Is Spoke. This little gem was supposed to be a Portuguese-English phrase book, but Carolino did not speak English. No problema! Using a French-English dictionary, he carefully “translated” the phrases he stole from a Portuguese-French phrase book. This exercise yielded such useful English expressions as:

At what clock dine him?
I am catched cold.
I have put my stockings outward.

About four years ago, an online advertisement heralded the opening of a new shop in an upscale California mall. The Italian designer (rhymes with nada) announced:

“The store will sell the conform residence’s ready-to-wear as well as the disdainful little products for both group as well as women. The entrances have been framed by the radiant, polycarbonate curtain. The delicate, immature board lines the walls. The women’s area contains seat lonesome by ivory tanned hide as well as hazed mirrors. The furnishings for the men’s area underline rosewood as well as discriminating steel.”

I visited the store, but did not find any disdainful little products (unless you count the sales people). The seat did not seem especially lonesome, and I didn’t observe any acts of discrimination by the steel—but to be fair—I was distracted by the hazed mirrors.

English-speakers find humor in the badly translated efforts of others. But how often do we consider how our “translated” text is perceived in other languages? If, by definition, English-only speakers don’t understand the target language, we can’t know how bad the translation is.

Some companies try to cut costs by machine-translating their product information. But then they don’t spring for the extra bucks it takes to have it edited by a native speaker. Rather than selling their products, they only provide international customers with a good laugh.

The lesson? If you speak nothing but English, good translation requires at least one other person. Someone fluent in the other language involved. A dictionary or a software product might be helpful, but it takes a human to protect you from making a fool of yourself.

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Old words, new tech

Today’s children probably wonder about some of the technical terms we use. Names for obsolete technology somehow manage to stick around long after their antecedents lie, refusing to decompose, in a landfill.

When applied to the new technology that took its place, the old name requires some explanation. At least people finally stopped referring to removable storage media as floppy disks. I last saw a 5-1/4″ flexible disk in about 1989, but the term persisted long after disks had long ceased to be floppy.

If you‘ve been around small children lately, you’re probably amazed at how tech-savvy they are. The little rug-rats are clever all right, but they don’t know everything. They need us to explain many things. Why we use certain terms. Where those words came from. Why we wore orange polyester in the 70s … but I digress.

Current examples include:

Pick up the phone – Hang up the phone – Dial 1-800-999-9999

How many kids have ever used a phone you can pick up, hang up, or dial?

Answering machine picks up on the fourth ring

There is no physical machine, and the phone plays a digitally recorded tone (or even a popular song). No bell, no ringing. Although the ringtone might be a digital recording of an old-fashioned phone ringing. No wonder they’re confused.

Cc: line in email

Carbon copy. Yes, years ago, we made physical copies on a typewriter with this nasty coated paper that rubbed off on your fingers, clothes, and other pages. No, really. We did. So what does that have to do with email?

Stay home and watch the tube.

How long has it been since televisions had tubes of any kind?

Tape your favorite TV show

Older children might remember the VCR, but most have experienced only digital recording. So when they hear this phrase, they might wonder where the tape is. It’s like magic, and it’s invisible, somewhere inside the TV. Or some other device. Anyway, there’s nothing to snarl, tangle, rewind, label, or store in boxes.

Assignment

Just for fun, find a smart eight-year-old and try to explain why we still say:

The accident was filmed by a witness with a cell phone.
Roll down your car window.
That singer has her own label.
Her husband owns a record company.
On the home screen, click one of the radio buttons.
My motorcycle has a 300-HP engine.

“Seriously, Daddy … HORSE … power?”

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Do we need grammar police?

People who correct others’ English grammar and usage mistakes … are they grammar police? I guess it depends on how they do it.

As with any other embarrassing attribute (bad table manners, crude language, body odor), bad grammar is least likely to be important to those who have it. And there is almost no polite way to point it out.

In most cases, if you call attention to a mistake, someone feels attacked. The culprit is defensive, thinks you’re pedantic (or worse), and discounts your criticism. Who cares? It’s not important. You know what I meant. Unless they ask for correction, it’s probably better to let it go.

Criticism stings, even (or especially), for people who pride themselves on their careful use of English. They’re the ones who do care, and they don’t expect to be corrected.

So how important is it to use precise, correct language? If your circle of acquaintances is very small and you have few interactions with other people, maybe not at all. But if you travel, work in a large company, deal with the public, or write for publication, your audience is bound to include non-native English speakers. They often learn English the way it is supposed to be, not the way we use it when we’re being lazy. And we all get lazy. Yes, all of us.

Here are two sentences, both from published articles. The writers leave it to you to figure out what they mean. A diligent English student, interpreting these by the book, would be confused:

1.  These casseroles are just as good now as they were as a kid.

       The casseroles used to be children, and now they are adults?

2.  By downloading this white paper the sponsor may contact you.

      When the sponsor downloads the white paper, he has permission to contact me?

Even admitted grammar police can experience a “comeuppance.” Last summer in Indonesia, I met a visiting family with two small sons. The mother is German. The father, who is French, works for an Italian company. Son Victor (age 7) speaks German, French, English, and a little Italian.

A local family was trying to train their dog, Dogé, not to jump up on people. When he planted his muddy paws on the knees of my beige slacks, I said, “Dogé! You can’t jump on people!”

Seven-year-old Victor quietly observed, in his third—yes third—language:

“Really, he can. We just don’t want him to do it.”

Ouch.

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Writing it down

The Internet is full of idioms and expressions that people get wrong. Popular examples include I could care less, for all intensive purposes, and take it for granite. In most cases, the speaker is just being careless.

Speech evaporates as soon as the words are spoken, understood, and replaced with more speech. But the act of writing it down imposes additional requirements.

You’re now held accountable for proper spelling and, most of all, sense. Readers can read it again. They can copy it and share it with others. If it doesn’t make sense, they might even have a good laugh.

In the olden days, when published works guaranteed at least some minimum level of editing, silly errors were rare. Books, magazines, and newspapers used professional writers and editors. We learned to write well by reading well-written material. But with the advent of Internet news sources and e-zines, young readers have a virtual landfill of bad writing at their – uh – disposal.

Here are three recent examples from “professionally” written online articles:

Hard to believe in this stay and age ….

The writer means in this day and age, and it’s possible that someone could misunderstand that if it were spoken. But do people even read what they write? It makes no sense at all.

It’s good to exercise regularly, but don’t overdue it ….

Exercise is something you shouldn’t overdo, but overdue is more suited to bills and library books. You see, children, once upon a time they had buildings full of actual books you could borrow, and you were supposed to return them by a certain … oh, never mind.

We expected a live performance, but all she did was lip-sing…

Allowing for the fact that it’s hard to sing without using your lips, this writer meant the performer only pretended to sing by synchronizing her lip movements with a recording. Spelled lip-synch or lip-sync, but not lip-sing.

Technology now allows us to publish our thoughts instantly. Without verification, editing, or even review. Autocorrect steps in and changes words we don’t want changed. Our fingers hit neighboring keys and we make embarrassing typos. The least we can do is try to produce the best first effort, then review. Double-check. Look things up.

It’s great when a piece of writing goes viral and thousands of readers see it. Not so great when your name is forever associated with a blunder.

Just ask Bill Buckner (1986 World Series, Game 6).

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Sentence-stuffing quiz

Some things are meant to be stuffed:

Thanksgiving turkeys
Antique parlor chairs
Teddy bears

Some things are not:

Speedos
Biking shorts
Sentences

If you stuff yourself into too-small clothes, the result is both unattractive and uncomfortable. Most people understand this. But when it comes to writing, it’s as if there’s a prize for the person who jams the most into a single sentence. Newspaper writers, supposedly trained in this skill, often overstuff sentences to ridiculous lengths.

So what’s wrong with sentence-stuffing? Leaving readability aside for a moment, let’s look at how the practice distorts your meaning.

Modifying phrases end up too far from the words they modify. They attach to the wrong words, usually with comical results.
Cause-and-effect statements misalign, assigning effects to the wrong causes.
Pronouns become separated from their antecedents and the reader can’t tell who’s doing what.

Read this sentence from a local newspaper:

Police found a resident on a bedroom floor who had fallen and injured herself the day before thanks to a call from an alert neighbor who noted her absence.

You might understand what this sentence generally means, but let’s take a closer look at what it actually says.

Quiz

The correct answers to these questions might surprise you:

Q: Who had fallen and injured herself?

A: The floor.

(….a bedroom floor who had fallen and injured herself….).

Q: What caused the fall?

A: A call from a neighbor.

(….fallen and injured herself the day before thanks to a call from an alert neighbor….).

Q: Where is the neighbor?

A: Not here.

(….an alert neighbor who noted her absence….).

How might the writer have reported the incident more clearly?

Police found an injured woman on her bedroom floor, where she had fallen the day before. A neighbor, who had not seen the woman all day, called police.

In two sentences, we can express the same thoughts clearly and in the same amount of space.

The next time you’re tempted to overstuff a sentence, remember Dolly Parton’s famous quip when her gown split at the 1978 Country Music Awards:

“My daddy said that’s what I get for putting 50 pounds of mud in a five-pound bag.”

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Advice about revenge and duplicity

In the classic film The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya seeks revenge on an elusive villain. The master swordsman repeats throughout the movie:

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

In another movie series, The Avengers, superheroes seek retribution for – or avenge – crimes against others.

Revenge is a noun.

Avenge is a verb.

I wonder, then, why there is such an epidemic of writing like this:

The grieving mother has sworn to revenge the wrongful death of her son …
Our foreign policy was intended to revenge the military actions of …
What would you have done to revenge 911 …?

To avenge something is to seek revenge. The words are not interchangeable.

Mother’s Day brings out a flood of tributes to moms who always gave good advise.

Advice is a noun.

Advise is a verb.

Mom gave good advice. To advise someone is to give advice. The words are not interchangeable.

Those two examples are at least related in meaning, and there is some weak justification for the confusion. But this one is inexplicable:

“I have two versions of my resume, and there is a lot of duplicity between them.”

Duplication means repeated content.

Duplicity means deception.

Within a single version of your resume, duplication makes it wordy. And two versions of your resume might highlight different skills but contain the same basic information, a necessary duplication. The difference is that duplicity suggests double-dealing or deceitfulness. No one with duplicity in his resume is likely to admit it.

When job-seekers ask my advice, I advise them to avoid both duplication and duplicity. If you lie to get a job, your manager will avenge the act and exact this revenge:

“Hello. I am Your Boss. You lied on your resume. Prepare to be unemployed.”

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Hyperbole out of control

Everyone exaggerates just a little now and then. Advertisers have to do it in order to sell products. But in elevating their claims to outshine the competition, ad writers have reached a tipping point.

In an unspoken agreement between advertisers and consumers, we all expect outrageous statements. We don’t believe most of them, and we’re not expected to. Many are done for comedic effect. A radio spokesman for a mortgage company shouts that choosing their low-cost financing is:

The biggest no-brainer in the history of mankind!

I always imagine one caveman saying to another, “Fire. Hot. Hurt.” There must be other examples of bigger no-brainers (“Woolly Mammoth! Run!”), although much of mankind’s history was not recorded so there’s no proof.

A frozen panini package gives directions for cooking the contents in the microwave, using the:

Revolutionary browning tray!

It’s the box, folks. You turn the box inside-out and place the sandwich on top of it. Revolutionary? Hardly comparable to that little unpleasantness with England in 1776. Or the French unrest in 1789. Or that 1917 dust-up in Russia.

So we take these claims with a grain of salt. Or do we? Perhaps we’re so conditioned to expect exaggeration that the line between truth and hyperbole has moved. The question is … in which direction?

A medical web site recently published an article that encouraged people with desk jobs to get up and move around periodically. It listed the dangers of working for hours while hunched over a computer, and identified some health problems that could result. Someone misinterpreted the article and published this bold statement:

Every minute you sit at your desk takes years off your life!

The claim was picked up and quoted, unquestioned, in dozens of other articles and blogs. The original article was well-intentioned, but stop and think about that misquoted sentence. If every minute you sat still in a chair took even one year off your life, most people would have died long before they were born.  That includes anyone who has ever:

Attended a concert
Driven 100 miles in a car
Seen a movie in a theater
Waited in a doctor’s office
Watched a football game on TV
Flown across the country in an airplane

Maybe it’s time to apply a correction factor to everything we read and hear. I once knew an honest-to-goodness drama queen who spoke almost entirely in exaggerations. Everything was more unbelievable, over the top, and simply amazing than whatever anyone else had ever seen.

If you seemed inclined to believe her, the family took you aside and explained, “Take everything she says and divide it by ten.”

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There is no trophy in catastrophe.

 

It must be the full moon … two occurrences of catastrophe misspelled in a single week. One in a newspaper, the other in a TV news graphic. And the culprits were both people who write for pay.

Catastrophe is of Greek origin and, like many words that came to us through Latin and Greek, its spelling seems strange. In most English words of more than one syllable, a final e is silent.

But it’s in the dictionary and spell checkers know about it, so there is no excuse for writing:

catastrophy

English teachers sometimes provide students with tricks to help them remember spellings. In elementary school we were taught “I before E except after C, or if sounded as A as in neighbor and weigh.” (The student who asked about seize was quickly shushed …)

My fourth grade teacher taught us to spell Geography with the sentence, “George Eats Old Gray Rats And Paints Houses Yellow.” All the little girls realized that one actually works … after we stopped squealing Eeeeeeew!

Our high school chemistry teacher told us we could remember the order of colors in the spectrum with the name Roy G. Biv (for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). But we’d never heard of anyone named Biv so it was easier to memorize the color spectrum than to remember the silly name.

People’s minds work in different ways. Tricks like these help some people recall rules and lessons. For others, the trick just complicates the process. It creates such a vivid mental picture that the student isn’t sure if that picture is the right way or the wrong way. So it’s with great caution that I warn you—the word catastrophe does not contain the word trophy.

If your fingers carelessly type catastrophy, picture it:

cat as trophy

Unless you’re writing about a feline Best in Show award, it’s wrong.

Greek and Latin words can be challenging, but there is no calliopy in the merry-go-round and exaggeration is not called hyperboly. So just remember that to spell catastrophe ending in y is the epitomy of sloppy writing and a recipy for disaster.

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Not to be—that is the answer.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet uttered, “To be or not to be, that is the question ….“ in a despondent mood. Questioning his own will to live, he wallowed in despair with no economy of expression whatsoever. In fact, he rather went on and on about it.

If you wrote that speech today, people would accuse you of being paid by the word.

Poetic, lyrical writing still exists, but most of us write for more practical reasons. Non-artistic writing communicates. It persuades, educates, warns, or amuses its audience. Everyday writing includes news reports, business communications, emails, web pages, social media posts, advertising, and a host of other categories.

Although different from each other, all types work better when they’re concise.

The various ways to make your writing more concise could fill a book. In fact, they have filled several. Some of these books, ironically, are not concise at all. But you can start looking for a common culprit in your own writing today – forms of the verb to be.

In English, to be verb forms include is, was, are, were, have been, is being, and am being, for example. Any sentence beginning with There (as in There are… or There is …) can be improved. Although that is not always involved, it’s often a telltale sign:

Before:  There are some issues that the committee is not going to consider until next week.

After:  The committee postponed some issues until next week.

Before: There were so many movies that were good to choose from that we could not decide which one to see.

After:  We could not decide which of the many good movies to see.

Before:  Whenever there were controls that were lifted, there was chaos and rampant bad behavior.

After: Chaos and bad behavior followed the elimination of controls.

To be verb forms often function as filler words. They leave the impression you’re avoiding or postponing the point of the sentence. Concentrate on the subject and what you want to say about it. Then just say it.

Will this tip protect you against all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? No, but it will give you some arms against a sea of troubles. You just have to practice and learn how to use it.

Aye, there’s the rub.

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